CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
come one, come all
IT SEEMS LIKE THE EMINENT THREAT brewing within the school hadn't been solved by the time Christmas break was over and classes were beginning again and the reluctant trickle of students clocked back into their routine.
Talismans were still exchanging hands, petrified students had spent nights in the infirmary with Madam Pomfrey flustered and fussing over them, shooing teachers (and even the Headmaster himself). Quidditch training had seen a couple injuries over the course of a couple weeks. When Violet had sprained her wrist and made a valiant attempt to hide it until Sawyer tossed her a bat, and she'd winced when it hit her hand, but couldn't hold onto it, Sawyer had to forcibly threaten Violet to go to the infirmary. It was there, with both of them sitting in the waiting area, that they saw it all, watching as Madam Pomfrey singlehandedly conducted the traffic of broken bodies coming in, and when she finally finished tending to the petrified students, finally working her way down the line of injured Quidditch players, tapped Violet's wrist with her wand in a silent healing charm and gave her some medication to counter the side effects.
Still, Quidditch practiced pushed on. Kenai had wrangled the Hufflepuff players into a scheduled regiment of drills and mock-scrimmages and conditioning. Sawyer and Oliver met up every morning to run laps around the Quidditch pitch every morning. Perhaps her commitment to this routine had been in part due to the fact that one side-effect of her medication had seen a significant amount of weight gain over the holidays when she'd been pretty inactive. Nobody made a comment on it, though, primarily because they didn't want to end up in the infirmary with a hole punched through their chest amidst the petrified students lying comatose in their cots.
Every morning, Sawyer took her pills and became a voyeur of her own life, floating inches above her body. This was what they called healing and recovery, but never quite becoming whole. But whole was never hers to be in the first place. What she had been was bruised knuckles and lighting fires and sneaking out of her house to run around in the dark to kiss boys she didn't care about, do things that made no sense, soaking in the tainted and trying to cough out something holy but ending up with the same thing over and over again. Temporary fixes to fill the rift inside her. Before, when she felt nothing and therefore cared about nothing. Now, she didn't know.
Now, it didn't matter. Now, both her and Oliver had slowed to a stop by the bench where they'd left their water bottles and towels, sweat gleaming on their temples, ankles damp from the dewy grass.
"I saw you and Violet at the infirmary the other day," Oliver said, stretching out his hamstrings. "What happened?"
"Just a wrist sprain," Sawyer said, rolling out her ankle. "Had to force the child to see Madam Pomfrey 'cause she was trying to hide it from everyone. Idiot. I think she just didn't want to see the petrified kids."
Oliver grunted in agreement. "She should take care of herself more. Especially in the position she's playing for."
A beat of silence lapsed over them as they stretched out.
"I think Quidditch might get cancelled," Oliver said, stress lining his features. "With all this shit going around."
"Maybe." Sawyer pinned him with a mirthful look. "I heard you've been grilling your team into the ground."
While some were actively paranoid about being the next victim of petrification, Oliver's paranoia lay with the inevitability of extracurricular activities being put on hold until the threat was neutralised. Even though he was a stellar athlete whose performance thrived under pressure, stress hit him hard, especially if the subject at hand was obstructing his ultimate goal. Sawyer had figured this out early from the time he'd been inducted into the Gryffindor Quidditch team because it manifested in such an entertaining manner—albeit, she could only afford the luxury of saying this because she was watching from the outside.
Oliver rolled his eyes. "If they're complaining, it's because they let themselves go too much over the break."
"Careful," Sawyer mused, "your dictatorship is showing."
"I'm running out of time," Oliver snapped, flicking her a glare. "We graduate next year, and I'd really like to win the Cup, or at least die trying."
It was both a culmination of the eminent threat of Quidditch's cancellation indefinitely, and the fact that this was their penultimate year—or, as Oliver liked to refer to it as, their penultimate chance to win the Quidditch Cup. Since training began, he'd been pushing his team exceptionally hard, testing their limits and then going beyond. Sawyer had run into a couple of them in the locker rooms, overheard their complaints about their sore muscles and having to fight the urge to put Oliver's head through the Whomping Willow. Their awful mood tended to linger in the air, a thundercloud of foul misery and righteous rage. Violet had told her, at some point last week, that Harry—who apparently confided in Violet quite a lot—was considering dropping out for the year. Of course, the moment that confession left his mouth, he'd taken it back. But the truth was out there. With Oliver bearing down on them with such an oppressive ferocity, Quidditch wasn't fun anymore.
"You're going to break them."
"Does it matter to you?"
Sawyer shrugged. "No. But, I suppose if you want to keep pushing them to the point of no return, it'll serve the other teams an advantage. Playing against a fractured team could give Hufflepuff the booster seat we need. I'll relay Marcus' thanks when Slytherin wins."
Nonplussed, Oliver could only blink at her, lips pursed thoughtfully. Maybe it was the idea that a team as weak as Hufflepuff would be able to beat Gryffindor at their lowest. Or perhaps it was the notion that Slytherin might claim the Cup instead. Or it could be the sole fact that Sawyer, who didn't actively participate in anything unless it served her purpose, was the one knocking sense into his head. Either way, she saw the fact of the matter slowly registering in his head.
Scratching the back of his neck, Oliver huffed. "I hate that I can't even be mad."
"Because I'm right?"
"Don't push it," Oliver said, narrowing his eyes.
Sawyer smirked.
"So I listened to the mixtape you gave me," Oliver said, lifting the hem of his sweatshirt up to wipe the sweat off his face. Sawyer tried not to stare at his toned stomach as she drained half her bottle. Her blood stilled in her veins as she waited for him to follow up on his revelation. After they'd exchanged their gifts on Christmas, neither of them had brought up the topic. Sawyer had to wait until Rio and Jeremy left her place—even though he'd fully gotten over the withdrawal symptoms, Rio had refused to go back to his house, convinced only when Jeremy had offered to go with him to get the rest of his things, so he could move into Jeremy's place temporarily; a nice change from being locked up in Sawyer's bathroom—to listen to the mixtape Oliver had gifted her. Since then, she'd listened to nothing else. They never wrote to each other about it—or even wrote to each other at all, actually—and Sawyer had assumed that they had made some unspoken agreement to never discuss it. Why he'd decidedly picked it up now was beyond her.
Sawyer set her water bottle back on the bench beside her towel. "And?"
"And," Oliver echoed, eyeing Sawyer as he crouched down to sit on the grass, long legs sprawled out before him. "I liked it. Um," he stuck his tongue against his cheek as he furrowed his brows and cocked his head to the side, scrambling to find the right words because (evidently) this wasn't Quidditch or Astronomy and any articulation at all seemed to have escaped Oliver in this moment outside of his element. "Thank you," he said, shooting her a rare smile, seeming to decide against saying anything else about it, not out of a lack of words to say but a lack of knowing how to say them all.
"I've been listening to the one you gave me," Sawyer said, because he'd given her something, and now she had to give something back in return. She settled down beside him, his eyes never leaving hers, and tilted her head to the quickly lightening sky as the sun crept out from behind the slate-grey clouds in shy snatches. She felt Oliver's curious stare bore into her cheek, and so she told him, "I suppose we can agree that your music taste isn't as insufferable as you are," because she couldn't look him in the eyes and tell him that she still hadn't taken the cassette tape out of her Walkman.
Oliver rolled his eyes. "Alright—"
"I never showed you Mötley Crüe," Sawyer mused, shooting him a searching look, lips upturned into a cruel grin. "You found them on your own, didn't you?"
"I might have talked to the guy who showed me how to make the mixtape," Oliver said, propping his arms out behind him and leaning back. When Sawyer shot him a puzzled look, he shrugged. "Wyatt knows your music pretty well."
Sawyer looked away. For a moment, she was silent as they sat there, letting the morning chill steal the heat from under their skin from their run.
"I know you don't like the way I treat him," Sawyer said, flicking him a cool look. "Your judgemental tone says it all."
"I'm not being judgemental," Oliver said, slanting her a deadpan look. "Maybe I was before because I just didn't understand a lot of it and I only know Wyatt's side of the story, but now I'm not."
"Say I believe you," Sawyer drawled, winding her fingers into the damp grass and pulling a clump of it out. She opened her fist and a couple blades of grass tumbled out, the rest were plastered to her calloused fingers, smudges of green on her palms. "What makes you think I care enough to fix this broken thing?"
"I got to know you better," he said, like it was that simple. "You're not as heartless as people make you out to be. Why do you let everyone talk about you like that? Does it not bother you?"
Sawyer shrugged. She didn't need to answer that.
Oliver frowned. "I don't like it."
"I don't care what you like or don't," Sawyer deadpanned. "It doesn't concern you."
"It does."
"Who says?"
"I do, because I fucking care about you," Oliver snapped, eyes flashing with barely restrained agitation, the words like an explosion of nuclear bombs singing over a harbour. Silence descended on them in the fallout, an immediate weight cast over them. Sawyer suppressed the violent urge to up and leave right there and then. She could count on one hand how many people cared about her. Even then, she didn't know what she'd done to earn a reaction this visceral from Oliver. It wasn't often he snapped at people unless it came to Quidditch. Most of his conversations she'd overheard during the few classes they shared were usually about new strategies and diagrams he'd drawn to guarantee Gryffindor's win during a match, the intensity in his tone unparalleled.
She levelled him with an indecipherable stare. Frustration sharpened his features as he met her gaze with hellfire in his eyes. A beat passed and neither of them spoke.
Overhead, a bird called. The school grounds began to stir. Somewhere beyond the pitch, the castle began to groan, shaking its old bones out.
Oliver shook his head, pinning her with a heated stare, like he was expecting a fight. "Whether you accept it or not, that's a fact. You can deny yourself this as much as you want, but this is the truth."
Truth was, Sawyer didn't know what to believe. But she knew fighting him was pointless.
"What changed?"
Sending her a surreptitious look, Oliver shrugged. "Secret."
* * *
BY THE TIME VALENTINE'S DAY ROLLED AROUND, the atmosphere wasn't any better. Tension lingered in the air, paranoia ran amok throughout the student body. Jeremy kept buying talismans and Marcus kept arguing against his careless expenses. Apparently it was Professor Lockhart's idea to liven the gloom, alleviate the mood a little more with a lot. All around the school, Sawyer couldn't go anywhere without seeing devastatingly pink flowers decorating the campus. Each time Rio or Marcus passed the lurid blossoms on the way to class or Quidditch practice, disgust rippled over their features and they'd rip the flowers out, callously crushing the petals under their shoes before vacating the scene. He loves me, he loves me not. Once joint at the hip, they couldn't bear to be in the same room as each other. Mealtimes were excruciating. They sat apart, Jeremy and Quinn wedged between them like a barrier.
"I hate this," Rio grunted, tearing a flower off its stand, and crippling the petals in a tight fist. Sawyer had just been let out of Transfiguration when Rio had run into her in the corridor, storming out in a hurricane of fury and ill-temper. The bags under his eyes hadn't gotten any lighter. Tremors from his addiction remained, like aftershocks of a quake that wouldn't stop clinging to the surface beneath his skin. Ever since his return to school, Rio's persistent and pervasive condition hadn't improved much more. Jeremy's potions kept him from collapsing into a heap of withdrawal shakes, but there was nothing to assuage the cracks Marcus had left in his dark heart. His only saving grace was that Marcus wasn't one of his roommates.
"Five cupids came into class today," Sawyer mused. "You should've seen it. McGonagall almost hexed the last one."
Dwarves had been hired to dress up as little cupids, topless and armed with golden harps and white diapers and golden wings too small for their round bodies. All day, they'd barge into classes and deliver valentines. If they weren't so hairy or tone-deaf when they recited love poems from one anonymous student to the object of their affections, it would've been more amusing than disruptive. Only, they proved not one bit endearing and more annoying.
During Astronomy the previous night, Quinn had gotten a valentine from an anonymous person. She'd kept the pink note in her textbook, glaring each time Sawyer poked at her and demanded to read it. Too quickly, Quinn had dismissed it as a misfire. An accident, even though the valentine had FOR: QUINN COMET branded on it in bold. She'd argued that she didn't have a valentine, and it wasn't possible that someone liked her like that. She was invisible, she'd insisted. People didn't chase girls who did boring things like read books and care about their grades and did nothing exciting. It would've been believable, the way Quinn had reasoned, if Jeremy hadn't manipulated Sawyer (against her will) into helping him come up with something not-too-cheesy-but-meaningful the day before.
Rio made a sound of disdain in the back of his throat when a cupid-dwarf nearly ran into his legs, stopping him short. "If I dropkicked one across the quad, is the detention worth it?"
Sawyer didn't answer.
Like a slap to the face, lunch was even worse. Heart-shaped confetti fell around them like pink snow from the pale blue ceiling of the Great Hall. Sawyer had to pick confetti out of her soup twice before she'd given up on it entirely. Out of frustration, Rio swept a hand across the table and knocked his bowl onto the ground, earning himself a handful of wary looks from the students surrounding him. The soup splattered over the floor in a puddle that oozed into the old tiles, and the bowl made a loud, clattering noise. Under the heat of his incendiary glower, they turned back to their own business immediately. With Jeremy and Quinn too engrossed in a conversation about the latest books they'd read and loved, the other three ate in a terse silence. Rio, because he didn't have the mood or the energy to speak. Marcus, because there was nothing to say and he was too out of his head to bother. Sawyer, because she hardly contributed to conversation anyway.
A piece of heart-shaped confetti handed on Marcus' head and a dark shadow passed over his face. One moment it was there, and he looked ready to rip and rend the world to pieces in a fit of rage, the next he'd retreated into his cold shell.
"I can't deal," Marcus grunted, swiping the piece of confetti out of his hair and dumping it into his untouched soup. Jeremy and Quinn snapped out of their bubble of conversation and watched with furrowed brows and troubled frowns as Marcus swung his legs over the bench and stalked away from the table with stiff movements. Their startled gazes never left him, even when his retreating figure left the Great Hall and vanished out of sight, but not out of mind.
After exchanging knowing looks, they glanced conspicuously at Rio, who merely glared into his plate.
"You could go after him," Jeremy offered, lifting a brow.
"He broke up with me, remember?" Rio said, cuttingly, a muscle in his jaw ticking. "Besides, I don't know where he's going."
"He still loves you," Quinn pointed out.
"And what would you know about us, hm?" Rio snapped, cruelty twisting his features. Boy-adversity against the world. "Last I checked, this wasn't your business."
"Hey, now—" Jeremy began, frown deepening.
Anger flashed across Quinn's features. "Last I checked, it became my business when we became friends." Her tone was cold, unflinching. "I understand that you're going through a rough patch, and you don't like feeling vulnerable like that. Maybe your rudeness is just your way of arming yourself to reinforce your defences. Or maybe because you're having a shitty month and you need to make everyone else feel shitty too. But don't fucking take it out on me or Jeremy or Sawyer. Just because I don't say anything whenever you get all caught up in your foul attitude doesn't mean I deserve to take shit when you direct your personal frustrations onto me. We're just trying to help. If you don't want to accept it, then that's on you. Grow up, Rio."
Amusement flickered over Sawyer's eyes as she glanced between Quinn, whose stare was steel and unmoving, and Rio, whose expression darkened a thousand shades, lip curling as though he were ready to rip into Quinn. Sawyer had seen many instances where Quinn had stood up for herself against Sawyer's jabs. Quinn was quiet, but she wasn't a total pushover. But she'd never seen Quinn lose her cool like that in front of more than one person. Perhaps she was a little too harsh, especially since none of them told her about Rio's addiction problem, but she'd said what the others didn't know how to say. She'd said what needed to be said; what most people were too afraid to say to Rio Alvarez's face. Perhaps if she'd known about the Christmas Rio had spent keeled over, less than a human, slightly more than a disaster, on Sawyer's bathroom floor, she would've tailored the blunt force of her livid rant a little more. But the words were out there already. From the thousand emotions flickering across Rio's thunderous expression like a thermonuclear furnace simmering with radiation, every point drove home. It was slightly impressive.
"Fuck you," Rio spat, anger snarling up in him, this shapeless thing, this all-encompassing thing. Suddenly, his expression sharpened, a blade he'd twist between her ribs. Before anyone could stop him, he lurched to his feet, the abrupt move once again drawing cautious glances from other students.
Then, he stormed out, anger wicking off his shoulders.
Quinn blinked. Her furious expression blanked. Then, seemingly realising her brutality, guilt crippled Quinn's features. She flicked a careful glance at Sawyer, who merely stared back, her eyes vacant as her insides.
Jeremy laid a hand over her's in concern.
"It's okay," Jeremy said, comfortingly. "He'll get over it."
Quinn let out a panicked breath. "What if he doesn't?"
"The truth is ugly," Sawyer said, picking up her fork and pushed down on a heart-shaped confetti in her bowl of soup, drowning it. "But it is the truth. And as much as he doesn't like it, he can't ignore it. Rio's stubborn and angry, but he's not stupid."
Still, Quinn didn't stop hyperventilating, anxiety gripping her in a chokehold.
Threading his fingers through hers, Jeremy smiled softly. "He won't hate you. He's been put through far harsher teachings by us—" Christmas, for one, was a prime example of Rio's forgiveness of brutality where it was required— "Sawyer especially. If anything, he was just mean because he knows you're right. Once he's over it, he'll respect you a lot more."
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
quinn POPPING OFF!!! 😔✊🏼
very excited to finish part 2..... exciting things are coming